It's pretty obvious that Bard was something Google had to do given the circumstances and there must have been a big push for it from very high up in the company; very unlikely that it's someone's promotion project.
Nobody really has an incentive to go after OpenAI right now. They leverage a ton of proprietary research, millions of dollars of GPUs and millions of users who they serve at a loss. And when they modify their model, those users then accuse them of self-sabotage and censorship, threatening to take their business elsewhere.
The market doesn't even know what it wants yet. Serving a weak, neutered model for simple home assistant stuff is the least controversial and most profitable option.